Day 42 – October 12 2012

Thank goodness the wind has abated overnight & the rain has cleared, making packing camp a lot more pleasant.  We drove this morning to Goolwa, another old port town near the mouth of the Murray River & drove along the waterfront to get a feel for the town.  There are a lot of old buildings & houses from the late 1800s when the town was prosperous, some of the prominent buildings have been restored very well.

We kept on driving to Milang, another old port town on Lake Alexandrina, this town has not fared as well as Goolwa, being a lot smaller.  There are a lot of fishermen’s shacks right on the edge of the lake that are jostling each other cheek to jowl.  We took a walk out on the jetty, disturbing lots of birds roosting there & had a look at the old hand crane formerly used to load wool & wheat off boats & onto rail carts.  The town appears to have an active railway historical society with a number of preserved rail artefacts near the old railway station, now a visitor centre.  There are also a few old buildings appearing to be as they were left when the doors shut last century, slowly falling apart due to neglect.

On the road from Milang to Wellington we passed through the Langhorne Creek wine production area & the vineyards of Wolf Blass, a prominent winemaker, his vines were very well tended.  There are hundreds of acres of manicured grape vines in this area.  At Wellington a car ferry is used to cross the Murray River just upstream from Lake Alexandrina, so that was a bit of excitement, waiting for the ferry to come across the river, unload, then take us across the river with around 8 other cars.

We turned onto the Princess Highway & drove along the edge of Lake Albert before stopping for lunch at another small former port town of Meningie.  We had a short walk along the foreshore where they are revegetating the lake edge & put in a walking path.  I resisted the urge to walk out on the jetty, it was a short one.

We then followed the Coorong along, this is a very narrow salt water lake system separated from the sea by a narrow band of sand hills called the Younghusband Peninsula. The Coorong lakes system has a lot of birdlife in it & extends for nearly 100km.

Our final stop for the day is another old port town, Kingston, & the Caravan Park, right next to the old relocated Cape Jaffa Lighthouse.  This lighthouse was stuck out on a reef on the sea & two lighthouse keepers & their families lived in the lighthouse as well.  They must have gone around the twist locked up like that for months on end.  We decided to walk around town & the walk along the seafront is smelly from all of the rotting seaweed piled up on the beach from the recent wild weather.  Another interesting thing is that there are no waves to speak of, it is if the sea is protected by a large reef system, the small waves just lap onto the beach.  There is a long jetty & I resisted the temptation of walking out on it, but Tereza was insistent so I finally agreed to accompany her out on the jetty (tell another one).  It was reasonably cold & windy out on the jetty, again, we were the only people crazy enough to be out there.  After that we walked around town & admired some of the nice old stone buildings from when Kingston was a thriving port.  It was a nice long walk, they appear to look after the public facilities reasonably well & there are a lot of nice new buildings around town (some not so nice) noticeably along the seashore.  Tomorrow we will stop at a couple of places of interest before we are off to the Little Desert National Park, so we could be out of contact for a while.  Again another pleasant day, we did find a few jetties we had to walk out on to make Ron’s day.